Mrs. Chadwick still held her eyes widely opened. “I don’t think it’s that, Roger. Being alone wouldn’t have helped us to be happier, after what’s happened.”
“Being with other people might. You must get back to Coldbrooks as soon as possible and see Nancy and Mrs. Averil and your neighbours. That will help to change the current of your thoughts.”
“People don’t forget so easily as that, Roger,” Mrs. Chadwick murmured, and it was now with severity, as though she suspected him of triviality. “When something terrible has happened to people they are in the current and Nancy and the neighbours are not going to change it. Poor Nancy; she feels it all as much as we do, I’m sure.”
And that Mrs. Chadwick thought of him as unfeeling he saw. She thought of him, too, with Barney, as criminal; as responsible for the catastrophe. The old phrase of presage floated back into his mind: “She’ll spoil things.” She had spoiled, for ever perhaps, this deepest, dearest relation of his life. What was Coldbrooks to become to him with Adrienne Toner in possession? He said, and he was unable to keep a certain dryness that must sound like lightness, from his voice: “You are in it but you needn’t keep your heads under it, you know. That’s what people tend to do when they shut themselves up with their misfortunes. You and Barney and Mrs. Barney, I suspect, are engaged in drowning each other. If one of you puts their head up the others pull it down.”
“I suppose you mean Adrienne does,” said Mrs. Chadwick. He had not meant it at all; but now he felt sure that so, exactly, did it happen. Poor Mrs. Chadwick left to herself would have drifted to the shore by this time and Barney, at all events, would be swimming with his head up; it was Adrienne, of course, that kept them suffocating under the surface. “Well, I think it a pity you three should go off to Torquay alone,” he evaded. “What’s happening to the farm all this time?”
“Nancy is seeing to it for Barney,” said Mrs. Chadwick. “She understands those things so well. Barney would not dream of letting the farm come between him and Adrienne at a time like this. He wants to be with her of course.”
“Of course. All I mean is that I wish he could be with her at Coldbrooks. I suppose the doctor knows what’s best, however.”
“I’m glad to hear you own that anybody can know what’s best, Roger, except yourself,” said Mrs. Chadwick with her singularly unprovocative severity. “Of course she must go to the sea and of course Barney and I must be with her. She has two excellent nurses; but I would never trust the best nurse for certain things. I remember so well when I was ill myself once and saw the nurse behind a screen, eating raspberry jam out of the pot with her finger. You can’t trust anybody, really.” And that was all he got out of Eleanor Chadwick. Adrienne had spoiled things.
It was in June that he heard from Mrs. Averil that she and Nancy were in London for a few days staying with an old aunt in Eccleston Square. Mrs. Averil asked him to come to tea and he asked her and Nancy to do a play with him; but before these meetings took place he saw them both. It was at a Queen’s Hall concert on Sunday afternoon that Mrs. Aldesey called his attention to his friends and, to his surprise, Oldmeadow saw that Barney was with them. They sat across the gangway at some little distance and his first impression of the three was that they were not happy.
“Did you know he was in town?” asked Mrs. Aldesey. “How ill he looks. I suppose he was frightfully upset about the baby, poor fellow.”